Personal computers are conventionally provided with a storage medium comprising a hard disk drive. A hard disk drive conventionally comprises a plurality of platters or disks on which data is recorded on the upper and lower surfaces. To enable data to be read from or written to the disks, the disks are spun at a substantially constant operational rate of rotation by a suitable motor. To improve the speed of data transfer and reduce latency, that is the delay in reading data from a platter, the operated rate of rotation has been increased as hard disk drives have been developed. Originally, all hard disk drives spun at 3600 rpm but development has led to hard disk drives with operational rates of rotation of 15000 rpm and above.
A problem with high rotational rates for hard disk drives is that the time taken to spin up the disks to the operational rate of rotation is greater than would be required for a lower rate of rotation. When a computer is turned on and performs a system boot, it is conventionally necessary during the system boot procedure to read from a so-called boot sector of the hard disk drive. If the hard disk drive has not yet reached its operational rate of rotation, the system boot procedure waits for the disk to reach its operational rate of rotation before continuing. This leads to an undesirable delay in the system boot procedure.
An aim of the present invention is to reduce or overcome the above problem.